"I made a drawing of Robert and he gave me a Polaroid photograph of a male nude".David Hockney in conversation with Charlie Scheips, 2004.

The pair first met in 1970 when Hockney and his assistant Mo McDermott visited Mapplethorpe who was living with the rock musician Patti Smith at the Chelsea Hotel, New York. Hockney went on to be photographed by Mapplethorpe on several occasions including the well known 1976 portrait on New York’s Fire Island with Henry Geldzahler, the well-known curator and cultural commissioner of New York in the 70s.

The exhibition features portraits of leading creative figures in contact with both Mapplethorpe and Hockney. Portraits including artists Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Ed Ruscha, and Louise Bourgeois are shown alongside the gay porn star Peter Berlin, writers William Burroughs and Bruce Chatwin, and the poet and rock icon Patti Smith. Hockney has also selected portraits of famous acquaintances including Richard Gere, Lord Snowdon, Yoko Ono, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Marianne Faithful and Iggy Pop as well as art world personalities. These include curator Mario Amaya, who was with Andy Warhol when he was shot in 1968; Sam Wagstaff, Mapplethorpe’s long time partner and one of the pioneering collectors of photography whose extensive collection was sold to the Getty Museum in 1984; and key art dealers such as Robert Fraser, Leo Castelli and Ileana Sonnabend.

Hockney takes the viewer on a personal selection of portraits, still lives, flowers and nudes in what is a previously unseen overview of the photographer’s work to date. The show comprises of around sixty of Mapplethorpe’s photographs taken in the years 1975 – 1988.